2/04/2008

The Lugubrious Game — Dali Collage?

This is a quote from the book Dada, Surrealism and their Heritage (MOMA, 1968) concerning the painting "The Lugubrious Game" by Salvador Dali"The eclectic Surrealism of Senicitas....led in 1929 to Dali's first mature works, a series of brilliant small pictures whose hallucinatory intensity he was never to surpass. In some of these, The Lugubrious Game, for example, the photographic realism of the painted passages is indistinguishable from those parts of the surface which are actually collage bits of photographs and color engravings. In equating his painting technique with the verisimilitude and surface finish of photography Dali here brought full circle the "perversion" of collage that was initiated by Ernst. Dali maintained the activity of collage, but in disguising even those differentiations of image components still visible in Ernst, he produced, in effect, an anti-collage."Looking at this piece as best as one can on the internet, I cannot tell what portions of this painting are photo, and which are paint. Is anyone familiar with this piece that can pinpoint this? Dali's masterful painting technique once again has fooled me and I can't tell from lame .jpg files.Through a Google books search, I found this further quote in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art Between the Wars, by Briony Fer, David Batchelor, Paul Wood regarding this particular Dali painting."There is no coherent unity to the figure; it is only the sum of these fragmented parts. But it is not only this figure that is 'dismembered'; in addition to some real elements of collage stuck on to the canvas, the painting as a whole deploys a collage-like technique to assemble fragments and parts."